Charles Hartshorne
What is metaphysics? There is real danger of taking the meaning of this term too much for granted, and of leaning too heavily upon an undefined word in the very act of dismissing metaphysics as word jugglery. Metaphysics is not, as I conceive it, the study of the wholly transcendent or supersensible. It may sometimes have been so conceived, and this is, indeed, one reason why some of its alleged results are so unsatisfactory—or, as positivists would say, meaningless. Such a meaningless “metaphysical” idea is the mediaeval doctrine of God as a power acting upon the world but not reacted upon by it, as purposive but non-temporal, loving but “impassive,” etc. Such is the windowless monad of Leibniz, connected with other monads only by pre-established harmony. Such is the Aristotelian idea of substance as that in which other things inhere but which itself is in nothing (apparently not even in the world or nature). The history of metaphysics is, indeed, strewn with failures to achieve meaning. But does this mean that metaphysics has scored no successes? Surely we must remember that human success is invariably of the fumble-and-correction type. Ideas such as those mentioned may be meaningless as they stand, and yet have potential meaning in that some modification of them might render them significant conceptions. We must also remember that mankind now possesses new instruments of logical analysis, and that these instruments may prove useful in metaphysics—not, as logical positivism holds, with the result of banishing all metaphysical ideas, but of correcting their erroneous aspects.
Metaphysics is the study of ideas universally applicable. These ideas define being qua being, the widest universe of discourse, or the universe of “all time and all existence.” Thus metaphysical does not mean behind or above the physical (or the observable), but all through the physical (or observable), and all through everything else, if anything else there be. In terms of how we know them, metaphysical ideas may be defined negatively as those known in some other way than by ordinary induction, or by purely formal (mathematical) deduction. Thus the principle of induction itself—as positivists admit—is not known by ordinary induction or by mere mathematics. Moreover, no statement concerning all time could be arrived at by induction. The laws of science used to be called “immutable,” but no jot of inductive evidence for this conception of them is available. Does it follow that the question, ‘What laws, if any, are forever true, is meaningless?
There is another possibility. Is not the clue to an answer to the question, what is immutable, to be found in the reflection that whatever change may do it cannot alter change itself? Time, that is, is itself eternal. But perhaps—you will say—time can be conceived to end, if not to change. This depends upon whether “existence” means anything in abstraction from time. I can find no imaginable meaning; in positivist language, no conceivable protocol meaning. And theologians have generally held that the attributes of the timeless God are chiefly if not solely negative. Thus there is reason for taking “eternal” to mean “whatever is essential to time as such.” Eternal truth is simply the content of the idea of time. Is it meaningless to ask what is the content of this idea? You may answer that perhaps many ideas of time are possible. Even so, we can ask what they all have in common. Besides, the content of the idea of time is partly fixed by the functions we require this idea to fulfil in relation to other fundamental ideas, such as actual, possible, individual, universal, space, etc. It is because these other ideas also lose their meaning if time be supposed absent that the abstraction from time was above declared impossible.
Metaphysics is the attempt to fix the content of basic ideas in relation to one another. Of what logical type are metaphysical judgments? Take the principle of induction, the reality of a cosmic order thanks to which predictions are possible. If, as has been asserted, this principle is pragmatic, then at least a pragmatic metaphysics is possible, whether or not this is its only conclusion. The form of its reasoning would be: if there are values which are presupposed in all possible valuation, these values must be pragmatically unquestionable. The possibility of prediction need not be the only such universally presupposed value. Moreover, the idea of a truth which most be believed but for which no evidence is attainable should not be lightly accepted.
According to positivism, philosophy is concerned with languages. Can it refuse to consider the question, what meanings are common to all possible languages? The definitions of these meanings will have universal, that is, metaphysical, relevance. Of course one may say that they will be universal meanings rather than universal truths, but the distinction is itself meaningless. For it is only with non-universal meanings that significance is separable from truth. Specific ideas may represent possibilities, not actualities, because they are correlated with specific alternatives; but the most general ideas are those which define the entire system of possible alternatives, but which themselves have no alternative. If they have meaning, this meaning can only consist in their describing reality; indeed, they will define “reality” as such, i.e., in its eternal, universal traits. There is no possible untruth of the most general ideas, but only the possibility of confusedly grasping their meaning. Failure to grasp metaphysical meaning or truth involves either the defect of vagueness or the defect of inconsistency. The remedy—never entirely efficacious it must be admitted—is to relate the metaphysical ideas into a system in which each concept helps to define and is partly defined by all the others. Circularity of definition is not necessarily fallacious. For this we have the authority of C. I. Lewis.1
Allied to the self-contained character of metaphysical definition is the intrinsicality of metaphysical evidence. The “coherence theory” of truth is admittedly unsound as applied to specific or inductive truths, truths with significant alternatives, yet it is sound as applied to generic or necessary truths. For the denial of a necessary truth can only be a necessary error, and what could this be but a contradiction in terms, an incoherent expression? It must also be remembered that it is not a question of mere ideas for which embodiment in some concrete experience must be found. For metaphysical ideas by virtue of their generality are always embodied in experience, including the experience of the metaphysician at every moment of his thinking. He may indeed fall into mere ideas in the sense of mere words without meaning; but if his words have meaning, this will be because his experience presents something to which the words refer. It is his business to find experiential basis, as well as systematic coherence, for his ideas. Whether or not he has succeeded will be judged by others with reference to their own experience, and their own methods of testing coherence.
But once more we confront the question, can anything really universal be arrived at by human beings? The answer is that “really universal” is itself a human concept, and cannot be used to demonstrate the necessarily non-universal character of human conceptions. To say that things may exist which do not correspond to our idea of existence (as entering into this assertion) is to contradict oneself. But surely human imagination is limited, surely there may be things the very possibility of which is unknown to us! Is not the blind man unable to conceive color? Perhaps, but what the blind man here lacks is not generality but specificity of meaning. He knows very well what in general color sensations must be: for he knows they are sensations, that they have qualities, relations of space and time, intensity, etc. The fact is that in order to entertain strictly universal meanings it is not necessary to have all possible experiences, but only experiences of some or any kind, plus the capacity to abstract, to create symbols for abstractions, and symbols for symbols—in short, to explicitly generalize. If a fish turned theologian, it would not conceive God to be a great fish (in spite of Rupert Brooke’s poem to this effect), any more than Aquinas conceived him to have limbs. A thinking animal, an abstracting and speaking animal, is limited not by virtue of being confined to the specific, but by virtue of being confined to the generic, plus only a small number of species out of the total. As Spinoza rightly said, we have an idea of God—any God there can be—and an “adequate” idea even, in the sense that it is as general as omniscience, but an inadequate one, in that it is abstract and vague when compared to the concrete and distinct generality of omniscience. The real difficulty is not in forming the most general ideas, for we cannot help forming them, but in distinguishing them (1) from each other and (2) from the more specific ideas with which they are entangled. The first difficulty is seen in its acuteness when we reflect that the universal aspects of existence may not be discrete but may form a continuum. In fact, it is a conclusion of metaphysical inquiry that they do so (Peirce’s doctrine of Synechism). It follows that there is no one final system of metaphysics, but an inexhaustible variety of ways of “carving up” the ultimate continuum. Neglect of this fact that the ultimate truths lack the discreteness of discursive thought is a cardinal weakness of Husserl’s doctrine of the Wesenschau, with its enlightening but over-simple conception of metaphysical insights. There is truth in C. I. Lewis’s contention that the ultimate cannot be captured in words; this much truth, that no metaphysical analysis will ever be the absolutely satisfactory and final one, but will be more or less relative to the particular needs of the culture that produced it.
The second difficulty, that of distinguishing the generic from the specific ideas, is met by systematically confronting every idea with the attempt to conceive its alternative. Thus, as we have already seen, theology performed a valuable experiment by attempting to treat temporal being as one species of being and timeless being as another. But the more one tries to get meaning out of this latter notion, in connection with other general ideas, the more one sees its meaning vanish, either into sheer vagueness or into contradiction. If, on the other hand, one treats time as generic, one can, by certain considerations recently set forth (Bergson, Peirce, Whitehead), find a place for all the fundamental ideas in a way which the older theologians did not anticipate, even as a doctrine to be rejected. Thus the alleged generalization beyond time is revealed as illusory. But if a physicist were to say that quantum mechanics is a strictly universal description of being, the answer would be that the very instruments of analysis which enable us to define the quantum can just as easily be used to define alternatives, the only difference being that the latter would not fit experimental facts. A race which could not generalize beyond Planck’s constant could not conceivably have discovered that constant. Physics selects among possible hypotheses, so that it is always certain that no physical theory represents necessary and eternal truth.
It appears from the preceding considerations that although metaphysical reasoning is not induction in the ordinary sense, it has an inductive aspect. For induction is reasoning from samples, which in ordinary induction are taken from perceptual experiences, but which in metaphysics are taken both from perception and from imagination (“ideal experiment”). Imaginative samples prove nothing in science (apart from pure mathematics); but might not induction from the whole range of imaginative variations upon perception which the thinker can invent, or discover in imaginative writings, including the history of thought, support an inference of the form: all imaginable entities, or all conceivable protocol statements, have such and such properties in common, ergo the widest concepts, such as being, can only refer to these properties? Of course we could never say that we have exhausted all imaginative possibilities; but by classification according to some rational principle, such as Peirce’s arithmetical list of categories, we might have reason to think that we had exhausted the major general classes, the neglected species involving only minute distinctions, and hence the sources of no gross errors, as the blind man makes no gross errors in philosophy by virtue of his blindness. If, as suggested above, ultimate truth is continuous, then to know it is to know its dimensions, and these can be discerned without experiencing every point on the continuum. From a few points extrapolation and intrapolation will yield conceptions of the dimensional contrasts.
According to this conception of imaginative induction, metaphysical judgments are both analytic and synthetic, though in different senses. They are analytic or a priori in the sense that they apply to all time, to actual as well as possible states of affairs, and hence arrive at necessary rather than contingent truth. Yet metaphysical judgments are synthetic in the sense that it is always only probable that we have approximated to a correct understanding of necessary truth. Even in arithmetic it is merely probable that no mistake has been made in a given course of calculation. But in metaphysics the lack of absolute certainty goes much further. For even imaginative sampling can never be absolutely “fair,” and at best our results lack the definiteness of purely mathematical ideas.
On the other hand they do not lack definiteness altogether. It is true, for example, that the idea of time is based upon an intuition, not a mathematical diagram or expression. Consulting this intuition some metaphysicians report that through all imaginable variations persist as characters of “time” the mass of settled or determinate events, the “irrevocable” past, contrasted with the unsettled, undetermined class of events constituting the “open” future. It follows, say these metaphysicians, that the concept of determinism, which implies that future events are in reality determined, is a contradiction in terms. This contradiction is a clash of intuitions, not of symbols manipulated according to rules. In so far it is not contradiction in the strict logical sense at all. Nevertheless, mathematical patterns can be fitted to the intuition of time, and to the idea of determinism, and the contradiction in question thus made strict and formal—only, however, on pain of making the relevance of the mathematical forms to the intuitions (imaginative experiences) itself a matter of intuition or of inductive probability. Thus metaphysical judgments are complex, and are not identical in kind with any of the usual classes of judgments, empirical or a priori. They do conform, however, to the most general principle of scientific knowledge, the application of mathematical forms to concrete intuitions or immediate data. (The Peircean doctrines of the arithmetical structure of the categories, and of their continuous, hence potentially geometrical, character, constitute some of the most remarkable steps in this direction ever made.)
Although ordinary induction cannot establish true metaphysical ideas, it may help to discredit false ones. This relation between metaphysics and inductive science is well illustrated in the history of the idea of substance. Modern physics and biology have shown that, in this cosmic epoch, at any rate, the substances admitted as such by Aristotle are really compound, consisting of parts which are themselves substances, that is, individuals. The rock has its atoms, the man his cells, and the cells their molecules. The compound individual, a non-Aristotelian concept, is made virtually compulsory (for this “cosmic epoch”) by experimental facts. But it was all along and eternally compulsory for metaphysical reasons. For the universe is necessarily individual, and it is necessarily compound. Spinoza pointed out that all individuality short of the universe is relative; but critics of Spinoza can show that even the individuality of the universe presupposes and is relative to individuality in its parts. There are many reasons for generalizing this relativity of substantial unity.
The idea of the compound and relative individual delivers us from two intellectual nightmares. The first is the nightmare of absolute atomism, which makes all higher levels of individuality mere shorthand for the lowest level. This view not only makes the universe as a whole metaphysically unintelligible, but it also contradicts the most certain of all facts concerning individuality, which is that the very meaning of the word depends on the experience we human beings have of individuality on a superatomic level. Consciousness is not a mere composite; its unity is given, and is the basis of all concepts of unity. Among the corollaries of this truth is the conclusion that both those who seek to deny, and those who seek to assert, the freedom (in the sense of spontaneity) of the human individual upon the basis of quantum mechanics alone are mistaken. For if a man is not merely many electrons, or many molecules, however organized into cooperating groups, but is also a single unitary individual (in some relative sense or to some degree) then the laws of quantum mechanics are only relatively true as applied to the human body, indeed (by analogous reasoning to be considered presently) as applied even to a single cell or protozoa. Quantum uncertainty may, as some hold, be statistically nullified in the body, in spite of the amplification of small effects by the nervous system, but the human individual as a unit may nevertheless possess its own quantum of uncertainty, indeed must possess it, if the analysis of time above hinted at is correct.2 The second nightmare of absolute substantialism is old-fashioned theology which, at least by implication, made all levels of individuality but the highest mere appearances or passive effects of the latter, mere puppets of deity. This is the opposite error; the universe as a unified individual may possess maximal, supreme power, but it cannot possess all the power, for then it would unify nothing, just as absolute atoms would not even be parts of the universe. Materialism and old theism are equally superseded in the concept of compound individuality.
Also superseded is dualism. Carnap’s doctrine of the unity of science, which does not assert that all sciences must discover the same empirical laws (a question which he leaves open, but which metaphysics answers, as just suggested, in the negative), but which does assert that all science must speak the same language, is sound metaphysics, even though it eschews metaphysics. For there are metaphysical principles at all only if all existence does have common features, expressible in common terms, or in one language. The only problem is the adequacy of the universal language proposed by Carnap, the “physicalist” language, or the language in terms of space-time structures. This language is universal only if we admit that experience is for scientific purposes identical with its physiological-behavioristic correlates, which are all that the physicalist language can express. Two arguments seem to be offered for this identification. First, whatever about experience cannot be translated into the physicalist language is necessarily purely private and incommunicable. Only physical structures are intersubjectively verifiable. Second, propositions in the language of experience are formally equivalent to certain propositions in the objective language, since by psycho-physical laws the latter can be deduced from the former and vice versa.
The first argument is valid only upon certain assumptions, which are of a metaphysical nature, involving, I believe, a subtly false metaphysics. To verify the feelings of others directly, or without translation into physical terms, we should—as a positivist has said—have to be those others, while yet remaining ourselves. This is held to be a contradiction. Is this reasoning not precisely a metaphysical argument? And the metaphysician knows where he is, namely back at the discarded conception of absolute individuality. For it is only this conception that is contradicted by the hypothesis. The conception of individuality as compound and relative suggests a different conclusion, the conclusion that the mutual exclusiveness of selves is relative and not absolute, and that therefore the language of experence [sic] may not be absolutely private, even apart from its translatability into the language of space-time.
It is true that the experiences of other human beings are not clear and distinct data in our own experience. But surely human beings are not the only experient individuals. The higher animals lack the language medium for communicating their feelings to us, but we do not seriously doubt that they have them. Nor is this conviction due solely to the fact that the expressive cries of animals constitute a sort of sub-language common in a measure to all the higher animals not excluding man. It is due also to the close structural and behavioristic analogies which irresistibly convey the impression of certain emotions and sensations as roughly common to the vertebrates at least. The question arises, at what point in the downward series of forms do we draw the line and say, here such a thing as feeling (memory, desire, etc.) absolutely ceases? Certainly we cannot draw it at a given point just because at that point communication with or interpretation of animal feeling becomes peculiarly difficult. The likelihood of things being in certain places is not proportional to the ease of our finding them there. And again, such structures as sense organs and brain are only specialized devices for achieving results which in cruder fashion are attained in the nerveless protozoa; namely, response to environmental conditions and unity of action. What fact opposes the hypothesis that wherever there is such response and such unity there is some form of experience which differs from the human form in complexity and versatility, in a manner and to a degree indicated by the differences in structure and behavior? And who is to show us that the protozoa are the simplest of responsive and organized individuals? Indeed, by what criteria could we identify as such an “individual” which did not act individually with respect to its environment? It is just because a piece of wood or metal lacks significant individuality of action that we regard it as a mere swarm of molecules; and just in so far as the latter lack this individuality they are mere swarms of atoms. As for electrons, they appear to have rather less distinctness than atoms, yet not to lack it altogether.
Thus the empirical facts suggest, far more clearly than in Leibniz’s day, the hypothesis which he proposed of a series of individualities with varying degrees of complexity and perfection of organization. To impute experience of corresponding richness or its opposite to these individualities is something more than the arbitrary use of an analogy. For, as Leibniz was the first to clearly see and state, the merely “physical” properties of a thing are exhaustively analyzable as patterns or arrangements, so that to add qualities of experience, shades and nuances of sentience, to our concept of the thing is simply to provide the only possible answer to the question, what is it that is arranged or patterned. To this question of quality we return later. At present our problem is the possibility of a direct verification of the feelings of individuals other than oneself. This problem is set in a new light by the panpsychic conception just sketched. For the individuals most directly and vividly present to us are those forming certain parts of our own bodies, especially the nerve cells. The pain which I feel in my finger is my pain. Yet I can have varying degrees of identification with the pain, can contrast it as content “there” in the finger with myself as spectator “here,” i.e., vaguely in the head and chest region. Panpsychism regards this as the phenomenon declared by positivism to be impossible, the phenomenon of a relativity of self-hood such that the sharing of the same feeling by different individuals is a given fact. The pain is not mine absolutely and simpliciter, but to a certain degree, and with reference to a not-myself to which it also in some degree belongs. Physiology suggests that this not-myself is a set of nerve cells. The individual psychology of the human person may be at the same time the crowd psychology of the human nerve cells. To be sure, the crowd of nerve cells is given indistinctly, presenting to observation a mass effect, in which individual outlines are lost. But the effect is vivid, and the spatial contrast of there and here, of self and content is no less so. In panpsychist ontology “there” and “here” can mean only self and other-self.
But there are other aspects of the same general principle. In memory we are at once our present and our past selves. These are the same self relatively, but relatively they are also different sentient individualities. Hence memory is direct vertification of the hypothesis of different individuals with more or less similar feelings.
The mind-body instance of direct participation in others’ feelings constitutes an independent check upon the validity of the argument for lower animal feelings from continuity and analogy. For supposing it turns out, as seems probable, that the essential physiological condition of human pain-sensations is some degree of damage to certain cells, or at least, of hindrance to their normal activity. Then the argument from analogy would infer that such cells would experience this to them immediately deleterious situation as suffering. The argument from direct participation—which, be it, noted was above held to be given as such, even if not in a crudely obvious manner—leads to the same conclusion. The same double approach is possible with all sensations. Red is a “warm” feeling; it involves a certain emotional set of the organims.3 If it eventuates that the cells most concerned in the sensing of red exhibit, by analogical evidence, a similar emotional set, then again panpsychism will receive empirical verification, at least as far as the gamut of animal forms is concerned.
Thus it is far from self-evident that the language of data is a merely private language. It may apply intersubjectively to all things. An important point here is that it need not be true that while physical characters are intersensory, common to all the senses, the qualities of sensation, such as redness, are, until translated into physical equivalents, peculiar to each sense. There is a mass of evidence that sense qualities have dimensions common to all the senses.4 Brightness and warmth are two such dimensions. To measure the brightness of sounds is exactly as easy as to measure that of colors. For the physiological identity of sound and color brightness there is also evidence. But this topic cannot be further developed here.
It is time to consider the second argument for physicalism, which is that the language of experience is equivalent to a part of the language of space-time, namely, to that part which describes events in the experient’s body. Panpsychism has two comments here. The first is that, since every individual is to be considered, for metaphysical reasons, in the interest of the unity of science, and with some empirical warrant, as in this sense a “body,” the language of experience becomes coextensive with the physical language. The second is that the “equivalence” of statements in the two languages is in one sense an exaggeration, and in another sense does not go far enough. It is an exaggeration in the sense that the physical language, as already remarked, is a language of structures, treated as independent of qualities, whereas experience is an affair of structures as constituted by relations of qualities. The latter are defined, as Peirce has taught us, by their monadic character. They are structures of the first or, if you prefer, of the zero degree. It follows that the idea of quality is statable in structural language, and hence does not fall outside the realm of the logically mentionable, as positivists sometimes seem, though hardly consistently, to suggest. But the first degree of structure has as such no explicit physicalist expression. On the other hand all degrees of structure are in principle experientially expressible. This suggests that the two languages are not equal for the opposite reason to that given by the physicalist (his reason being that the experiential language is a part and the other language the whole). The true distinction is that, although both languages apply to all individuals, and in this sense are coextensive, the physical language states only an aspect of each individual, whereas the psychical language states all aspects. For behavior can be viewed as changes in one experience as participated in, thereby involving changes in, another experience. ‘ The physical or outer side of things is simply the inner side as entering into the nature of other things. It is a relational pattern involved in the social character of existence, as Whitehead has shown in detail (See Process; also Adventures, Bk. III). Thus the duality of material and immaterial is not a duality of two different natures, nor an ultimate difference even of two languages, since comparative psychology will eventually, weld them into one, but is only the fact that individuals are sentient at once of themselves and of each other. There is no mystery in this, unless there is mystery in the fact that being is neither mere unity nor unrelated or absolute plurality.
From another point of view the relation between the languages is more intimate than positivists allow. For the equivalence which they speak of is empirical, not a priori. It involves mutual implication only by reference to psychophysical laws, which have to be empirically discovered. But is it merely a contingent fact that the quality of certain sensations appears together with a certain structure of physical behavior? The direct experience seems to be rather of a mutual aesthetic relevance of quality and structure. Indeed, structure itself seems to have a kind of unitary character, i.e., quality (Peirce’s Firstness of Secondness and Thirdness). And there is in the quality of brightness (or, the same thing, shrillness) a certain tenseness well-known to art, and seeming to unite quality and behavior patterns inseparably. “Warmth” also seems both qualitative and behavioristic, as does pain or pleasantness. The relevance of this consideration, tenuous as it may seem, to the argument by analogy to the qualities of other minds is obvious. Positivists assume a doctrine of external relations between qualities and structures which is really metaphysical, and, I believe, mistaken. A certain relative externality does hold. But absolute externality may be like so many other absolutes, a mere limit of thought to which actuality does not attain. Waiving metaphysical reasons for this view, I remark only that the purely irrational or miraculous character necessarily attaching to the distribution of qualities which were absolutely independent of their contexts renders the supposition of such independence repugnant to that faith in the intelligibility of things through their contexts from which scientific successes derive.
As a final example of the more fundamental status of the psychical language, the bearing of panpsychism on the problem of induction may be mentioned. Positivism leaves the possibility of prediction a pragmatic postulate,5 as though human needs had power to determine cosmic events. But panpsychism puts the question of cosmic order in a less mysterious light. For it holds that the human need for order is nothing peculiar in nature, but only a special case of a universal law, the aesthetic law of unity in variety. All individuals desire such unity, including the world as an individual, and this desire is the future itself as related to the present, that is, as future. The world has a future only because it “dreams of things to come,” this dreaming, or anticipating, or planning, being futurity as we experience or can imagine it. The aesthetic law of unity in variety—a priori demonstrable not empirical—guarantees that the future shall involve neither pure determinism, for that would be absolute monotony, aesthetically intolerable, nor pure chaos, equally intolerable, but relative determinism, like that in Bach’s music.
It all comes to this. Experience discloses certain variables or dimensions of differentiation. Such are space, time, intensity, the dimensions of the color solid. The questions confronting the whole of science are these: (1) can all the qualities of human experience be described in terms of such potentially continuous variables or dimensions,6 or must we also assume non-relative differences, such as may be construed neither as that between different values along one dimension nor as that between two dimensions in the same intersecting system of dimensions; (2) are the qualities of the non-human parts of the universe to be conceived as “values,” perhaps quite different values, of the same variables as are represented by qualities given to us, or at least of variables falling upon the same intersecting system, or must we suppose that non-human things possess characters that are quite outside the system of variability which experience itself discloses? The second alternative seems in both cases meaningless, for “characters,” or any other general concept can be defined only by reference to the system spoken of. Most thinkers agree in regarding space and time as structural variables common to man and other entities; panpsychism is the doctrine that there must also be common qualitative dimensions. (The proof is given in Peirce’s dialectic of First, Second, Third.) Whether these common structural and qualitative dimensions are called psychic is merely a matter of verbal taste. The point is simply whether there is a common ultimate system of possible differences in terms of which the world may be indefinitely understood. So long as the internal qualities of experience are so carelessly treated as they still are in psychology and philosophy the problem must remain rather indefinite. But the chief danger of positivism is that in excluding questions which it is unable at the moment to define meaningfully it will really “block the path of inquiry,” which is a still greater sin against logic than using words without clear meaning. The issue between positivism and such a metaphysics as that of Whitehead (the kind positivism ought to be
considering, instead of systems produced by thinkers not trained in science) is partly concerned with certain very real methodological deficiencies in this metaphysics as now presented (I see, for instance, no possibility of a valid grounding of the doctrine of “eternal objects” as this doctrine has hitherto been stated); but it is also, and perhaps in even greater measure, a question of whether or not the path of inquiry is to be kept open by employing hypotheses that do not set limits in advance to the intelligibility of the world as we experience it, or to the unifiability of the sciences. Physics can absorb psychology without intolerable paradox and make-believe only if it be construed as the behavioristic side of a universal comparative psychology by virtue of which even differences of feeling-quality become indefinitely public as well as private facts.
Notes
1. Mind and The World Order, pp. 81-82.
2. See also my article on Contingency in the Jour. of Philos., 29 (1932), pp. 421 ff., 457 ff.
3. See Psychological Abstracts, VI (1932), 2084.
4. Grounds for holding these qualities also intersubjective are given by Donald Williams, Psychol. Rev., 41 (1934), pp. 472 ff.
5. See H. Feigl, “The Logical Character of the Principle of Induction,” This Journal, 1 (1934), 20-29.
6. See my book, The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation (The University of Chicago Press). Also C. S. Peirce, Chance, Love, and Logic, p. 221; or in The Monist, Vol. II, p. (547 (to be republished in Volume VI of The Collected Papers of Charles Peirce, Harvard University Press).
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, “Metaphysics for Positivists,” Philosophy of Science, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Jul., 1935), pp. 287-303.
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